Herb London

When President Obama received his Nobel Prize, he argued that he would regard nuclear proliferation as his primary challenge. This is hardly surprising since even as a Columbia College student he advocated a nuclear free world – a position consistent with the idealism of a student who knew very little about the ambitions of U.S. adversaries. Yet now after eight years in office, the president retains this same arms control illusion.

In a commonly told Israeli joke or aphorism, two taxi drivers come to an impasse on a single road. The first driver says move aside so I can pass; the second driver says the same. Emotions explode. After hurling insults, the first driver leaves his cab with fists flailing. He sees a Jew seated in the back of his rival’s taxi and proceeds to beat him up. The second driver upset by what he observed, gets out of his cab and heads for his rival’s taxi. Quite coincidentally, there is also a Jewish passenger in the back seat and he too is beaten up. What is the moral of this story?

In the wake of a decision by the Permanent Court of International Arbitration that there isn’t any legal basis for China’s claim to territory in the so-called “nine-dash line” (an area which covers most of the South China Sea), the Chinese National Defense Ministry said “China’s armed forces would firmly safeguard national sovereignty, security and maritime interests and rights, firmly uphold regional peace and stability, and deal with all kinds of threats and challenges.”

If one relies on recent accounts in the news, we are all post-structuralists now. Post structuralism was a response to the structural intellectual movement that human culture can be understood in logic and language. Post-structuralists are skeptical of human science accepting relativism and obscure phenomenology as its method. As post-structuralists see it, objective conditions only reveal the superficial dimensions of human behavior.

On the first day of Ramadan, June 28, President Obama delivered an address for the Muslim faithful in the United States. In this address he expressed sympathy for Gazans, especially those who have had Ramadan celebrations foiled by Israeli missiles.

A new poll finds New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in a double-digit lead against his republican opponent for the fall elections. But the survey finds that ratio changes, if a progressive third party candidate emerges.

When President Obama visited Berlin a couple of years ago he raised the prospect of an idea that circulated throughout the twentieth century: world citizenship. Eminentos such as H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell contended that unless humanity embraced this nation, it is doomed.

Holocaust museums around the globe present in remarkably graphic form pre-war Nazi conditions that promoted anti-Semitism and the belief that Jews were sub-human. Children read schoolbooks in which Jews were depicted as exploitive, dangerous, lacking in essential human qualities. Jews were demonized to an extent that led inexorably to concentration camps and extermination. The horror of this period is told and retold in museums as a reminder that this must never happen again. Propaganda of a vicious variety has consequences, a condition the world now knows all too well.

The State of the Union address by President Obama is a month away, but the content and orientation of that speech can be limned from White House briefings. Rather than discuss failures such as a healthcare website that still rejects applicants or ellipses such as the unrecorded conversations about the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi or political coercion such as the selective IRS vetting process for not-for-profit organizations, the president will concentrate on the deal with Iran as a major achievement.

For the new class of self-proclaimed progressives there is a tale of two cities, one privileged and one underprivileged. This dichotomous model comes right out of the Marxist playbook. However, despite its simplicity and repudiation of human nature, it continues to have appeal as President Obama and Mayor Bill de Blasio can attest.

A presumptive deal between the United States and Iran to curb the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for an easing of sanctions is regarded in the White House as a breakthrough, cutting the Gordian knot between intractability and persistence. Yet before the acclamation begins a cautionary note is warranted.

For elderly women who cut coupons in order to survive in their Florida apartments; for pensioners accustomed to monthly checks; for those who were saving for that condo in Tucson, the world as they have known it will be gone. Although politicians cannot say it for fear of generating public panic, the globe is so awash in debt that fiat money, cash reserves and savings will all be in a perilous state in the not too distant future.

Tokyo policy makers have been engaged in diplomatic overdrive in an effort to resolve a territorial dispute with Russia over four southern islands in the Kuril Island chain. This dispute has stunted bilateral relations for six decades.

You had a lot to say on the WAMC listener comment line this week on everything from Joe Donohue's interview with Jesse Ventura, Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney's '47 %' remarks, and several of our WAMC commentators. Segments of these comments ran Friday Sept. 21 on Midday Magazine and Northeast Report.

As the winds of Islamism blow across North Africa yielding unsettling horror, the American version of Neville Chamberlain sits in the White House, incapable of real action, but immersed in rationalization. Yes, the president did repudiate State Department moral equivalence (i.e. “offensive” film equals justifiable homicide). But he is inert, a model of confusion.

It is axiomatic to suggest that if there are three Jews in a room there is likely to be nine opinions – each one shaped by a view of reality. As a consequence, there are dozens of Jewish organizations representing every political opinion and judgment under the sun. However, on one matter there was usually convergence, the welfare of Jewish life and the state of Israel.

The Muslim Brotherhood charm campaign in the U.S. has officially been launched. Now that the Brotherhood is no longer an opposition group, but a political juggernaut controlling a majority of the seats in Egypt’s parliament, a series of meetings with experts in the U.S. have been organized to convince the wary that they are far more moderate than their reputation suggests.